The advent of the World Wide Web (the “web”) has presented the public with access to an unprecedented amount of easily available information. This has made publishing information on the web attractive for those who wish to disseminate information rapidly and widely. However, it is generally difficult for novice users to publish information on the web since (1) technical skill is required to set up and maintain a website, and (2) a great deal of effort is required to organize and generate information in an aesthetically pleasing way. Thus, the time required to create and maintain a website has become for many a significant problem. For example, even if a user only wants to put a few photos on the web with a minimum of comments, he or she must typically invest considerable time and effort to resize the photos, create thumbnails, and make sure the comments appear properly next to each picture. Likewise, if a busy professional wants to “share” information online (i.e., place information on the Internet or an intranet) about his or her career in order to advertise skills or to attract colleagues with similar interests, he or she may spend an entire day just creating the website, and consequently lose interest in adding information to the site later or in keeping it up-to-date. Users learn quickly that creating websites is “hard” and is not worth the trouble. Furthermore, the degree to which many “homemade” websites are not user friendly has been a central topic of discussion among website usability and design professionals; many websites lack even the most basic accessibility support to make them readable by visually impaired persons, for example.
One tool for streamlining the website creation process, which was developed by IBM, is called “uServ”. Briefly, uServ makes the details of publishing information (such as learning HTML, Javascript, FTP, and so on) invisible by allowing users to put information on the web by simply right-clicking on a file and selecting “publish”. This spares the user from having to learn an excessive number of technical details regarding webpage creation. However, it does not make it any easier to give the website a desired appearance or layout, which in itself can be a time-consuming and difficult process. Although GUI editors in uServ help speed up the process, the user must still perform detailed work that involves decisions about color scheme, the number and size of photos (if they are used), how to make the site “useable” or “accessible”, and so on.
Many programs are available that allow for drag and drop and WYSIWYG (“What you see is what you get”) methods for creating webpages, such as Netscape Composer and Dreamweaver. Using these methods, one can select, for example, a horizontal border, a headline object, or a link object and place it on the webpage. However, the user must still fill out a form indicating text, color, and size for many of the objects, and the link object requires the user to type in the path to the linked data for every piece of data. If the user wishes to share, say, 30 documents, this can be time consuming, as it is still quite difficult to associate data with the layout of the website. In short, these programs are best suited for web developers who create professional websites.
Automatic webpage builders, which are available on the web, give the user a form to fill out and then automatically create a webpage from that form. These tools can create standard HTML webpages (see, for example, the Internet web site whose address is given by the concatenation of “http://”, “www.”, and “webspawner.com/create.html”, and the Internet web site whose address is given by the concatenation of “http://” and “geocities.yahoo.com/home/”) or more attractive Macromedia FLASH websites (see, for example, the Internet web site whose address is given by the concatenation of “www.” and “moonfruit.com”). While these tools simplify the process of creating a website, they do not automate the process of sharing and formatting the layout of documents or other data. The user typically must upload each file to a server and then give details of how the data will be presented, e.g., what the link anchor text will be (i.e., the text that appears to the user as the hyperlink), whether it is a bullet list for each file, and so on. Many of these tools also force the user to choose a template for the layout of the website before entering any information. Like webpage design software, automatic webpage builders require the user to 1) learn how to use some particular tool or software to create a website, 2) manage how the shared information is presented on the site, and 3) choose a template for the overall structure of the website.
Enterprise collaborative tools (see, for example, the Internet web site whose address is given by the concatenation of “www.” and “opentext.com”, and the Internet web site whose address is given by the concatenation of “www.” and “groove.net”) are intranet solutions to sharing data within an enterprise. They make sharing documents very easy, but do not automatically create the layout of the data for browsing. One tool (see the Internet web site whose address is given by the concatenation of “www.” and “opentext.com”) has a search engine interface that is used to find and present documents. Another tool (see the Internet web site whose address is given by the concatenation of “www.” and “groove.net”) creates team or workgroup “places” in which documents or other data can be shared. These documents are typically placed into a “documents” or “data” folder associated with the team or project and are not organized based on any type of metadata. Also, the user is required to setup and maintain these workgroups as well as the files in them (e.g., delete old files, update files that have changed, add new folders, and so on).
There remains a need for automating the process of creating and maintaining a website.